‘Knife Fights,’ by John A. Nagl

The cliché has it that armies always prepare to fight the last war. But in the years after the conflict in Vietnam, the United States Army did almost exactly the opposite. American generals, defeated by a guerrilla insurgency, strove mightily to pretend it had never happened, and prepared for the fight they preferred, a big-army-versus-big-army duel like the kind that unfolded in World War II.

Remarkably, the United States got one of those in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when, in a ground campaign that lasted just four days, it pushed Saddam Hussein’s hapless forces out of Kuwait. After that, many commentators pronounced the United States unassailable. Then came the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which the United States began the way it started the gulf war, with columns of tanks seeking to destroy Hussein’s army. In about three weeks, the military toppled the regime and American soldiers prepared to come home.

And then a guerrilla insurgency bloomed across Mesopotamia, catching the United States military disastrously unprepared. The Vietnam War, it turned out, had never gone away. The last Americans didn’t leave Iraq until 2011, after about 4,500 of them had been killed and more than 30,000 wounded. At least a hundred thousand Iraqis died, too.

John A. Nagl was one of the few American officers who saw the future. As a leader of a tank platoon in the 1991 war, he predicted that future enemies were not very likely to oppose the United States with big uniformed armies, since they would almost certainly be wiped out. Instead, Nagl concluded, the United States would in all probability face guerrilla insurgencies, and the American military should prepare to fight them — prepare, in other words, a strategy of counterinsurgency, whose main goal is not killing the enemy but protecting the population and supporting a government that wins its allegiance.

“Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice” is the story of Nagl’s career in the United States Army, which essentially amounted to a 20-year struggle to prod the Army into adapting to the modern reality of guerrilla war. Much of Nagl’s struggle unfolded as the United States was fighting two insurgencies; Nagl himself, deployed to the seething Iraqi town of Khalidiyah in 2003, was stunned at his own lack of preparation. “I had had no official Army training on counterinsurgency during my four years at West Point and 12 years in the active Army.” By the time Nagl retired as a lieutenant colonel in 2008, the Army had more or less adopted his worldview. For his efforts, which helped save many lives, Nagl deserves the gratitude of every American.

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Marines watch the Imam Ali mosque at Najaf, which was seized by the Mahdi Army, 2004.CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times

His memoir is another matter. The trouble with “Knife Fights” is that the story Nagl tells is quite familiar to almost anyone interested in reading a book like this one. The United States military did indeed go into Iraq woefully unprepared, and by 2006, it was engaged not just in battling an insurgency but also in trying to quell a horrific sectarian war between the country’s dominant Muslim sects. The war in Iraq seemed lost to almost everyone except a small group of like-minded officers, of whom Nagl was one, and President Bush. In 2007, Bush sent 25,000 additional soldiers to Iraq, while his generals, notably David Petraeus, the newly appointed commander, ordered the troops to carry out a counterinsurgency campaign: to concentrate not on killing guerrillas but on protecting Iraqi civilians. The results were striking; 18 months later, violence in Iraq had dropped dramatically, and in some former battlefields, like Anbar Province, to almost nothing. The “surge,” as it became known, was successful enough that it avoided what seemed a certain defeat for the Americans and a cataclysm for the Iraqis. “Knife Fights” dutifully recounts the story, but doesn’t add much to what is already widely known.

The other problem with “Knife Fights” is analytical. The Iraq story does not end with the withdrawal of American combat troops, though Nagl’s discussion of it mostly does. While the Americans might have quelled the insurgency and the civil war, they had in no way prepared the country to face the future on its own. The government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was corrupt, deeply sectarian and beholden to the Islamic Republic of Iran, just across the border. Maliki’s coalition did not even receive a majority of the votes in the 2010 election, and remained in power only through the cynical maneuvering of American officials, who appeared to directly contravene the Iraqi constitution to keep their preferred candidate in office.

When the last Americans departed, Maliki was free to attack the country’s Sunni minority, driving it into the arms of extremists, like those who make up the Islamic State, or ISIS, whose leader spent time in an American prison. In June, when ISIS rolled into northwestern Iraq, the Iraqi Army, built at enormous American effort and expense, largely disintegrated. All that is now keeping ISIS fighters from entering Baghdad are Shiite militias, armed and directed by Iran. Less than three years after the American departure, Iraq is mostly a failed state.

You wouldn’t know this from reading “Knife Fights,” and the situation in Afghanistan, the other American counterinsurgency, is not much better. Thirteen years after overthrowing the Taliban regime, the United States military is preparing to leave; by the end of this year, there will be fewer than 10,000 American troops on the ground, and by 2016, they will be gone entirely. Today, the Taliban are as strong as they have been at any point since 2001. The Afghan state, largely built by the Americans, exists mostly as a collection of criminal networks that prey on ordinary Afghans. The country shows every sign of heading toward civil war; the power-sharing agreement, announced in September, between the two main presidential candidates, following a nationwide election shot through with fraud, doesn’t so much arrest those fears as confirm them. It is not difficult to imagine that Afghanistan will go the way of Iraq.

What does this say about the United States’ ability to wage counterinsurgency? Not much. Nagl seems to regard the American experience in Iraq as something like a draw, and he expresses concern about what will become of Afghanistan after the Americans pull out. The answer, he appears to believe, lies in trying harder: “The final tragedy of Iraq and Afghanistan would occur if we again forgot the many lessons we have learned about counterinsurgency over the past decade of war.”

In fact, the truth seems simpler: No matter how much time and effort and blood the United States expends, it has proved itself to be not very good at fighting guerrillas in faraway countries, and in setting up governments that endure. Counterinsurgency is an interesting theory, but the practice of it — at least the American practice of it — has been mostly a failure. If there is any lesson to be learned in the 13 years since 9/11, it’s that.

KNIFE FIGHTS

A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice

By John A. Nagl

Illustrated. 269 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95.

Dexter Filkins, a former Baghdad correspondent for The Times, is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “The Forever War.”